


Oubliette

by dorian_burberrycanary



Series: Nocturnes [1]
Category: A Discovery of Witches (TV)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode 1.06, Established Relationship, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-28
Updated: 2018-10-28
Packaged: 2019-08-09 03:41:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16442312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dorian_burberrycanary/pseuds/dorian_burberrycanary
Summary: You don’t split the lark to find the music. The night after La Pierre was never going to be easy.





	Oubliette

  
  


 

Slants of sunlight pour through the Bodleian’s high windows. Dark wood walls arch up, carved with intricate designs that seem to shift though she never sees the movement. Footfalls and the rustle of turned pages interrupt the silence, but when Diana looks about the entrance hall in a slow circle, the room is deserted.

She glances back at the call desk to find Sean—anyone—but a pile of books is already waiting for her. Diana reaches out to touch the binding of the topmost manuscript. The murmurs and rustling shift closer as the room around her darkens.

The ground beneath her feet will give way if she touches Ashmole 782—she knows this in her gut, her heart. She is going to fall and fall, but she can’t stop her hand reaching towards the bound manuscript.

Her fingers brush against the stiff leather.

Everything slips away—her research, her plans, Oxford, her whole life blurring out before her eyes—

Diana is falling and the muddy stone ground rushes up at her until with a—

 

 

—she scrambles to get back up as her hips and arms and back all light up with pain. Satu isn’t going to stop. _Please, please, just make it stop—why won’t this—_

“Diana.” The bed dips followed by the slight chill of his body, near but not touching, and then his hand tucks the hair that’s fallen into her face behind her ear.

Curling forward hurts, everything hurts, but she hides her face against her knees, against the blanket she's been carrying around all night like a child and tries to slow the tumbling speed of her heart.

She can’t allow herself this. She needs to be brave and strong and not let the torn ache in her mind, the angry red mark of the brand, the sickening fear—she can’t let any of this touch her. 

Matthew presses a kiss to the top of her head. His voice is low and steady though she only picks out a few words. _Safe._ _Tuer. Cœur_.

But she didn’t push herself out of the mud and up off stones all those times to break down now. Diana forces her body to uncurl, sucking in air against what the movement does to all the parts of her that ache.

“I’m all right.” She tries to meet Matthew’s eyes, tries to sound convincing.

“Diana.” A pause settles between them. He adjusts the blanket. At last he says, “I’ll be here.”

She nods and closes her eyes. The subtle chill of his body fades.

Diana lies still and listens to the rustling sound of the fire that by slow degrees drops into nothing.

 

 

She's floating. The force holding her suspended flings her down again. She lands against the flagstones and her arm goes a white-hot numb. _Don’t be broken_ , she begs.

_Don’t break._

The mud squelches under her knees as she forces herself to stand, but she keeps flashing back to the vampire’s hand brushing over her cheek and skimming down her throat. The blank darkness she saw behind his eyes twists the knots of panic in her chest tighter. Even if Satu stops, that’s not an end. She’s going to be torn to pieces in every way until—

 _I’m going to die here_ , she thinks as flames spring up, licking in a ring around her pinned body while a slow line of fire pulls her shoulders apart.

Satu’s fingers press along her spine like she wishes she could force her hand inside, shoving past bones and between her lungs to rummage around for whatever secrets lie hidden within her heart, her power, her—

 

 

The bright red glow fades from her palms until all that remains is the unsteady cast of firelight. 

Matthew stands a few steps back from the bed. His expression matches when he had watched her first see the marks burned into her skin—his fury wound so tightly in on itself that his face looks almost blank.

Diana stares down at her hands and the first darkening points of bruising. The last echo of unfamiliar magic tingles and fades. “I didn’t mean to—” but she doesn’t even know what to call this magic. “Did I hurt you?”

With a blur of movement he kneels next to the bed, but he reaches for her hands slowly.

His touch is gentle while his eyes stay wild.

“You didn’t hurt me.” His thumb ghosts across her palm, contact without pressure. “That’s a spell for protection I haven’t seen in a long time. Not since the Inquisition, I think.”

She looks over, helplessly curious for all these pieces of the past he carries inside him. But the sensation of blunt, hot magic forcing itself at her, over and over, lingers like a dirty film that dims and numbs everything.

“Which Inquisition?” she tries, but he doesn’t smile. Neither can she. “I didn’t know that I could protect my mind until Satu tried to force her way in.” Her skin crawls. “She didn’t stop, nothing made her stop until she passed out after burning the—”

_You brand horses—cattle—_

She shoves the rest back down and focuses on the cool touch of Matthew’s skin against hers, on his hands that she first acutely noticed when, outside her rooms, he lifted her wrist to kiss her quickening pulse. She remembers the slow walk across campus, wrapped in his coat with the sleeves so long she had to fold them up high enough the pale lining showed. How she’d listened to the flex and shift of his voice—from cautious to unexpectedly funny to solemn—as he spoke of his research.

 _I never gave you back your coat_ , she thinks, as though that mattered now.

Diana pictures the gray coat still hanging on the hook of her room’s front door.

The oversight was more deliberate than she would’ve admitted at that time. She’d been so greedy for any small piece of him she could get.

Diana reaches out to touch his face. She wishes she could find words for this confused rush of feeling, scraped and layered like vellum written and rewritten on until nothing legible remained—what she felt for him then, how she loves him now, all those hours at La Pierre she doesn’t know what to do with now that the ordeal is over.

He turns his head to press a kiss to the pad of her thumb.

“I’ve been having nightmares ever since I touched Ashmole 782,” she confesses without quite meaning to. She shrugs one shoulder since a few bad dreams hardly matter after everything else, even as she feels the phantom crawl of that huge spider on her stomach and the brush of sticky gossamer lines of web wrapped around her. She shivers.

Maybe to prove something—or perhaps just to spite the baffling malice of all these creatures she’s never harmed, never interfered with—she says, “I should try to sleep.”

He stares up at her, solemn. “All right.” His fingers brush along her arm as he withdraws. 

She is so tired.

Diana stares into the darkness behind her closed eyes until it becomes like a pool she wishes she could throw herself into, and drown.

 

 

She tips her head back, wavering on her feet, as she looks up and up to the small shadowy circle that marks the top of the hole. The air is rank with decay. At the edge of her vision, she sees fragments of old bones.

She scrapes the skin off her fingers scrabbling at the stone walls because she needs to get out. She can’t stop—she isn’t going to die down here. She loses her nails and then more and more of the skin on her palms until all she sees when she looks down at her hands is patches of bone and gore. 

She’s forgetting something that gleams just outside the whirling circle of her thoughts. But every time she stops, the darkness tightens like an iron band around her lungs until she’s lifting her raw hands back to the stone.

In the distance, a bird calls, achingly sweet, and Diana remembers with a dizzying rush that she can—

 

 

A delicate pink glow fills the room. Matthew sits near the banked fire, lost in thought. If she shifts or breathes too deeply, the raw-edged ache in her body will catch back up to her.

The bird gives another silvery rolling call.

She'd heard the same sort of birds in the morning while Matthew slept next to her, pale and inhumanly still and so beautiful her heart ached with a longing that sex had done nothing to ease.

That was yesterday morning. Such a short span of time seems impossible to stretch between these two points.

The thrum of her magic slides just under her skin, restless, filling her lungs and dancing along the lines of her bones. The light in the room unfurls from pink to coral to coppery gold.

 _Come back to bed_ , she thinks to Matthew, to the person she’d been yesterday morning as though she could crawl back in time to that suspended moment right before she had leaned in to kiss his bare shoulder. But her tongue feels heavy and useless. Matthew and the room and the dawn all abstract into a soft impression that slips away.

 

 

Dozens of bright points interrupt the darkness that encircles the bed. The candlelight casts a warm sheen across the rumpled sheets and over his pale skin. 

Matthew’s hand drifts up the inside of her bare thigh. His gaze feels like being pinned to the bed and his eyes are so dark she can see only a faint ring of blue. The wait, this slow telegraphing motion up, makes bursts of images flicker through her mind, overlaying the chill brushes of his body between her legs. Her eyes flutter close and—

—a stranger's hand on her throat—the ground rushing up as she braces for the pain that—

“No, shh. Shh.” He leans up to kiss her. “Stay with me.”

His fingers press in a tight circle he has already figured out she likes so much that she can’t keep from arching up against his hand.

He gives a low, pleased laugh and kisses just behind the turn of her jaw.

She wants this moment to spin out forever. She wants to come, shaking apart, on his fingers with the sound of his voice, that laugh, in her ear.

She wants to push him back onto the sheets, get her hands and her mouth on his body to find out what makes him feel this good, this—

 

 

Daylight falls in slanted columns, drawing pale shapes on the floor. In the hazy space between sleep and waking, she studies Matthew’s profile as he stares into the remains of the fire. Diana catches a glimpse of something raw and bleak before his expression smooths out and he looks up.

“You’re awake.”

She yawns against the back of her hand and shifts her shoulders, testing the soreness, as he crosses the space between them to sit on the edge of the bed.

“How do you feel?”

Diana considers her stiff but unbroken body. She feels snatches and fragments of her magic below her skin like a song playing in a distant room where before there had been silence.

She wants to say, _none of what happened is your fault_ , but she isn’t sure if he can bear to hear it.

Diana takes his hand and kisses his knuckles, then the center of his palm. She glances up before pressing her lips against the inside of his wrist where no pulse beats.

He stills and she recognizes the surprise that flickers through his eyes. She wishes she could tear open her heart and pour the contents out between them if it would beat back that look. She wants to flip through the years and rip the throat out of whoever filled him with so much doubt about what he deserved.

A skimming cloud makes the room dim and then brighten.

Diana says the only things she can think of.

“Satu couldn’t open me up. You found me. We’re together.” She presses her scarred palm, marked with the outline of the strange alchemical child, against his open hand and thinks, _we’re going to be okay._

Diana closes her eyes and rests her forehead on his shoulder.

She feels the shivering awareness of his gaze like delicate sheets of ice forming under her skin. Finally, his mouth touches the top of her head, not even a kiss, but a gesture stripped down to a simple point of contact between them.

Outside, birds chirp and flutter. The last rosy softness fades as the dawn collapses into day and time, pitiless, stumbles forward.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr at [@burberrycanary](http://clktr4ck.com/qcg8).


End file.
